A Day in the Life of a Theology Student

So, you may have noticed I haven't blogged in a while. About that...

Much of it is my own fault, a product of innate laziness and a lack of motivation to wade into the murky waters of the blogosphere. (I know, that's a mixed metaphor. Get over it!) After all, the relative anonymity of the Internet often brings out the worst elements in us. We type the sorts of things most of us would never say to another person, because here we're not really interacting with persons, just with words on a screen. And while the general conversational nastiness of the medium hasn't made its way here in a while, it still depresses somewhat my desire to put my best (or even fourth- or fifth-best) thought out here to be picked apart by the small-minded bullies (faith-based and otherwise) of blogdom.

Also, I've been exploring my creative side a little bit. I've picked up a new mandolin, and have been playing it for the last few months. And now it looks like I'll be getting a violin, my first musical love. I played violin for 11 years (from age 7 to 18), but quit after I graduated high school. While my parents never made me play, I still felt the pressure that came from their approval. I felt like if I didn't play, I would somehow disappoint them. That sucked all of the joy out of music for me, though it is no one's fault but my own.

This past summer, however, I felt like I could live without music any longer, and since then I've devoted most of my free time to cultivating whatever musical ability there is left in me. Which, biologically speaking at least, should be a great deal, since my identical twin brother is one hell of a musician. Consequently I don't have nearly as much of what little free time I ever had, and so have been less than faithful with this blog.

Today, however, I thought I'd drop by and give you at least a tiny glimpse of the chaos that is my life at the moment. Balancing family, school, church, and now music, is getting complicated. So, here's what I have to do today:

1. Write FOUR papers. (Fortunately they are short ones, just 3-4 pages each.)

2. Make a lesson plan for the Wednesday evening Forum at church, which is part of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture. For the lesson I'm putting together a brief discussion on Christian views on violence (quick overviews of pacifism and Just War theory) and then screening the HBO documentary Ghost of Abu Ghraib, before leading a discussion on the ethics (or lack thereof) of torture. This is what passes for fun for me right now.

3. Do some general maintenance around the house while Sami and Adam are gone today. For those of you with any mechanical skills, what I'm doing will seem quite simple. I'm fixing an antique lamp (nothing wrong with the wiring, just the body) and hanging up three new sets of blinds to replace the (cheap) ones that our cats have torn up. But as I am, well... mechanically challenged (read "inept"), this may be the hardest thing I'll do today.

So far I've got one set of blinds up, written one of the four papers, outlined two more papers, and located the sources I'll use for the fourth paper, and almost fixed the lamp (it is all in one piece now, but is sitting crooked). Not bad.

When I blog again, I'll write down some of the Adam stories I've been collecting between my ears. I've also been wanting to post some of my observations of how the text of Philemon speaks to oppression, and also on differences between the way that white and black Christians see Moses. But for now, I'm back to work.